Manage your subscription

Experiencing a feeling of frustration about qualia

Published 4 September 2019

From
Ben Haller, Ithaca, New York, US

Trying to explain away the “hard problem” of consciousness, Rowan Hooper claims qualia are illusory and so there is nothing to explain (22 June, p 34). He says “we don’t normally talk about our qualia, we talk about things such as being tired”. But that misses the point.

A smartphone can register that its battery is low, display a low-battery icon on its screen and shut off safely when its power level gets too low. But nobody would claim that the smartphone “feels tired”. It isn’t experiencing tiredness in a conscious way like a human. It experiences no …